Dreamsongs. Volume II

by George R. R. Martin

  For all the good it had done.

  The last twenty-odd pages in the back of the binder were still blank, the blue lines on the paper faint with age. The pages were stiff as she turned them. When she reached the final page, she hesitated. Maybe it wouldn’t be there, she thought. Maybe she had just imagined it. It made no sense anyway. He would have known about her father, yes, but their mail was censored, wasn’t it? They’d never let him send such a thing.

  Randi turned the last page. It was there, just as she’d known it would be.

  She’d been a junior in college when it arrived. She’d put it all behind her. Her father had been dead for seven years, and she hadn’t even looked at her binder for three. She was busy with her classes and her sorority and her boyfriends, and sometimes she had bad dreams but mostly it was okay, she’d grown up, she’d gotten real. If she thought about it at all, she thought that maybe the adults had been right all along, it had just been some kind of an animal.

  …some kind of animal…

  Then one day the letter had come. She’d opened it on the way to class, read it with her friends chattering beside her, laughed and made a joke and stuck it away, all very grown-up. But that night, when her roommate had gone to sleep, she took it out and turned on her Tensor to read it again, and felt sick. She was going to throw it away, she remembered. It was just trash, a twisted product of a sick mind.

  Instead she’d put it in the binder.

  The Scotch tape had turned yellow and brittle, but the envelope was still white, with the name of the institution printed neatly in the left-hand corner. Someone had probably smuggled it out for him. The letter itself was scrawled on a sheet of cheap typing paper in block letters. It wasn’t signed, but she’d known who it was from.

  Randi slid the letter out of the envelope, hesitated for a moment, and opened it.

  IT WAS A WEREWOLF

  She looked at it and looked at it and looked at it, and suddenly she didn’t feel very grown-up anymore. When the phone rang she nearly jumped a foot.

  Her heart was pounding in her chest. She folded up the letter and stared at the phone, feeling strangely guilty, as if she’d been caught doing something shameful. It was 2:53 in the morning. Who the hell would be calling now? If it was Roy Helander, she thought she might just scream. She let the phone ring.

  On the fourth ring, her machine cut in. “This is AAA-Wade Investigations, Randi Wade speaking. I can’t talk right now, but you can leave a message at the tone, and I’ll get back to you.”

  The tone sounded. “Uh, hello,” said a deep male voice that was definitely not Roy Helander.

  Randi put down the binder, snatched up the receiver. “Rogoff? Is that you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry if I woke you. Listen, this isn’t by the book and I can’t figure out a good excuse for why I’m calling you, except that I thought you ought to know.”

  Cold fingers crept down Randi’s spine. “Know what?”

  “We’ve got another one,” he said.

  WILLIE WOKE IN A COLD SWEAT.

  What was that?

  A noise, he thought. Somewhere down the hall.

  Or maybe just a dream? Willie sat up in bed and tried to get a grip on himself. The night was full of noises. It could have been a towboat on the river, a car passing by underneath his windows, anything. He still felt sheepish about the way he’d let his fear take over when he found his door open. He was just lucky he hadn’t stabbed Randi with those scissors. He couldn’t let his imagination eat him alive. He slid back down under the covers, rolled over on his stomach, closed his eyes.

  Down the hall, a door opened and closed.

  His eyes opened wide. He lay very still, listening. He’d locked all the locks, he told himself, he’d walked Randi to the door and locked all his locks, the springlock, the chain, the double deadbolt, he’d even lowered the police bar. No one could get in once the bar was in place, it could only be lifted from inside, the door was solid steel. And the back door might as well be welded shut, it was so corroded and unmovable. If they broke a window he would have heard the noise, there was no way, no way. He was just dreaming.

  The knob on his bedroom door turned slowly, clicked. There was a small metallic rattle as someone pushed at the door. The lock held. The second push was slightly harder, the noise louder.

  By then Willie was out of bed. It was a cold night, his jockey shorts and undershirt small protection against the chill, but Willie had other things on his mind. He could see the key still sticking out of the keyhole. An antique key for a hundred-year-old lock. The office keyholes were big enough to peek through. Willie kept the keys inside them, just to plug up the drafts, but he never turned them…except tonight. Tonight for some reason he’d turned that key before he went to bed and somehow felt a little more secure when he heard the tumblers click. And now that was all that stood between him and whatever was out there.

  He backed up against the window, glanced out at the cobbled alley behind the brewery. The shadows lay thick and black beneath him. He seemed to recall a big green metal dumpster down below, directly under the window, but it was too dark to make it out.

  Something hammered at the door. The room shook.

  Willie couldn’t breathe. His inhaler was on the dresser across the room, over by the door. He was caught in a giant’s fist and it was squeezing all the breath right out of him. He sucked at the air.

  The thing outside hit the door again. The wood began to splinter. Solid wood, a hundred years old, but it split like one of your cheap-ass hollow-core modern doors.

  Willie was starting to get dizzy. It was going to be real pissed off, he thought giddily, when it finally got in here and found that his asthma had already killed him. Willie peeled off his undershirt, dropped it to the floor, hooked a thumb in the elastic of his shorts.

  The door shook and shattered, falling half away from its hinges. The next blow snapped it in two. His head swam from lack of oxygen. Willie forgot all about his shorts and gave himself over to the change.

  Bones and flesh and muscles shrieked in the agony of transformation, but the oxygen rushed into his lungs, sweet and cold, and he could breathe again. Relief shuddered through him and he threw back his head and gave it voice. It was a sound to chill the blood, but the dark shape picking its way through the splinters of his door did not hesitate, and neither did Willie. He gathered his feet up under him, and leapt. Glass shattered all around him as he threw himself through the window, and the shards spun outward into the darkness. Willie missed the dumpster, landed on all fours, lost his footing, and slid three feet across the cobbles.

  When he looked up, he could see the shape above him, filling his window. Its hands moved, and he caught the terrible glint of silver, and that was all it took. Willie was on his feet again, running down the street faster than he had ever run before.

  THE CAB LET HER OFF TWO HOUSES DOWN. POLICE BARRICADES HAD gone up all around the house, a dignified old Victorian manor badly in need of fresh paint. Curious neighbors, heavy coats thrown on over pajamas and bathrobes, lined Grandview, whispering to each other and glancing back at the house. The flashers on the police cars lent a morbid avidity to their faces.

  Randi walked past them briskly. A patrolman she didn’t know stopped her at the police barrier. “I’m Randi Wade,” she told him. “Rogoff asked me to come down.”

  “Oh,” he said. He jerked a thumb back at the house. “He’s inside, talking to the sister.”

  Randi found them in the living room. Rogoff saw her, nodded, waved her off, and went back to his questioning.

  The other cops looked at her curiously, but no one said anything. The sister was a young-looking forty, slender and dark, with pale skin and a wild mane of black hair that fell half down her back. She sat on the edge of a sectional in a white silk teddy that left little to the imagination, seemingly just as indifferent to the cold air coming through the open door as she was to the lingering glances of the policemen.

  One of the c
ops was taking some fingerprints off a shiny black grand piano in the corner of the room. Randi wandered over as he finished. The top of the piano was covered with framed photographs. One was a summer scene, taken somewhere along the river, two pretty girls in matching bikinis standing on either side of an intense young man. The girls were dappled with moisture, laughing for the photographer, long black hair hanging wetly down across wide smiles. The man, or boy, or whatever he was, was in a swimsuit, but you could tell he was bone dry. He was gaunt and sallow, and his blue eyes stared into the lens with a vacancy that was oddly disturbing. The girls could have been as young as eighteen or as old as twenty. One of them was the woman Rogoff was questioning, but Randi could not have told you which one. Twins. She glanced at the other photos, half-afraid she’d find a picture of Willie. Most of the faces she didn’t recognize, but she was still looking them over when Rogoff came up behind her.

  “Coroner’s upstairs with the body,” he said. “You can come up if you’ve got the stomach.”

  Randi turned away from the piano and nodded. “You learn anything from the sister?”

  “She had a nightmare,” he said. He started up the narrow staircase, Randi close behind him. “She says that as far back as she can remember, whenever she had bad dreams, she’d just cross the hall and crawl in bed with Zoe.” They reached the landing. Rogoff put his hand on a glass doorknob, then paused. “What she found when she crossed the hall this time is going to keep her in nightmares for years to come.”

  He opened the door. Randi followed him inside.

  The only light was a small bedside lamp, but the police photographer was moving around the room, snapping pictures of the red twisted thing on the bed. The light of his flash made the shadows leap and writhe, and Randi’s stomach writhed with them. The smell of blood was overwhelming. She remembered summers long ago, hot July days when the wind blew from the south and the stink of the slaughterhouse settled over the city. But this was a thousand times worse.

  The photographer was moving, flashing, moving, flashing. The world went from gray to red, then back to gray again. The coroner was bent over the corpse, her motions turned jerky and unreal by the strobing of the big flash gun. The white light blazed off the ceiling, and Randi looked up and saw the mirrors there. The dead woman’s mouth gaped open, round and wide in a silent scream. He’d cut off her lips with her skin, and the inside of her mouth was no redder than the outside. Her face was gone, nothing left but the glistening wet ropes of muscle and here and there the pale glint of bone, but he’d left her her eyes. Large dark eyes, pretty eyes, sensuous, like her sister’s downstairs. They were wide open, staring up in terror at the mirror on the ceiling. She’d been able to see every detail of what was being done to her. What had she found in the eyes of her reflection? Pain, terror, despair? A twin all her life, perhaps she’d found some strange comfort in her mirror image, even as her face and her flesh and her humanity had been cut away from her.

  The flash went off again, and Randi caught the glint of metal at wrist and ankle. She closed her eyes for a second, steadied her breathing, and moved to the foot of the bed, where Rogoff was talking to the coroner.

  “Same kind of chains?” he asked.

  “You got it. And look at this.” Coroner Cooney took the unlit cigar out of her mouth and pointed.

  The chain looped tightly around the victim’s ankle. When the flash went off again, Randi saw the other circles, dark, black lines, scored across the raw flesh and exposed nerves. It made her hurt just to look.

  “She struggled,” Rogoff suggested. “The chain chafed against her flesh.”

  “Chafing leaves you raw and bloody,” Cooney replied. “What was done to her, you’d never notice chafing. That’s a burn, Rogoff, a third-degree burn. Both wrists, both ankles, wherever the metal touched her. Sorenson had the same burn marks. Like the killer heated the chains until they were white-hot. Only the metal is cold now. Go on, touch it.”

  “No thanks,” Rogoff said. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Wait a minute,” Randi said.

  The coroner seemed to notice her for the first time. “What’s she doing here?” she asked.

  “It’s a long story,” Rogoff replied. “Randi, this is official police business, you’d better keep—”

  Randi ignored him. “Joan Sorenson had the same kind of burn marks?” she asked Cooney. “At wrist and ankle, where the chains touched her skin?”

  “That’s right,” Cooney said. “So what?”

  “What are you trying to say?” Rogoff asked her.

  She looked at him. “Joan Sorenson was a cripple. She had no use of her legs, no sensation at all below the waist. So why bother to chain her ankles?”

  Rogoff stared at her for a long moment, then shook his head. He looked over to Cooney. The coroner shrugged. “Yeah. So. An interesting point, but what does it mean?”

  She had no answer for them. She looked away, back at the bed, at the skinned, twisted, mutilated thing that had once been a pretty woman.

  The photographer moved to a different angle, pressed his shutter. The flash went off again. The chain glittered in the light. Softly, Randi brushed a fingertip across the metal. She felt no heat. Only the cold, pale touch of silver.

  THE NIGHT WAS FULL OF SOUNDS AND SMELLS.

  Willie had run wildly, blindly, a gray shadow streaking down black rain-slick streets, pushing himself harder and faster than he had ever pushed before, paying no attention to where he went, anywhere, nowhere, everywhere, just so it was far away from his apartment and the thing that waited there with death shining bright in its hand. He darted along grimy alleys, under loading docks, bounded over low chain-link fences. There was a cinder-block wall somewhere that almost stopped him, three leaps and he failed to clear it, but on the fourth try he got his front paws over the top, and his back legs kicked and scrabbled and pushed him over. He fell onto damp grass, rolled in the dirt, and then he was up and running again. The streets were almost empty of traffic, but as he streaked across one wide boulevard, a pickup truck appeared out of nowhere, speeding, and caught him in its lights. The sudden glare startled him; he froze for a long instant in the center of the street, and saw shock and terror on the driver’s face. A horn blared as the pickup began to brake, went into a skid, and fishtailed across the divider.

  By then Willie was gone.

  He was moving through a residential section now, down quiet streets lined by neat two-story houses. Parked cars filled the narrow driveways, realtors’ signs flapped in the wind, but the only lights were the streetlamps…and sometimes, when the clouds parted for a second, the pale circle of the moon. He caught the scent of dogs from some of the backyards, and from time to time he heard a wild, frenzied barking, and knew that they had smelled him too. Sometimes the barking woke owners and neighbors, and then lights would come on in the silent houses, and doors would open in the backyards, but by then Willie would be blocks away, still running.

  Finally, when his legs were aching and his heart was thundering and his tongue lolled redly from his mouth, Willie crossed the railroad tracks, climbed a steep embankment, and came hard up against a ten-foot chain-link fence with barbed wire strung along the top. Beyond the fence was a wide, empty yard and a low brick building, windowless and vast, dark beneath the light of the moon. The smell of old blood was faint but unmistakable, and abruptly Willie knew where he was.

  The old slaughterhouse. The pack, they’d called it, bankrupt and abandoned now for almost two years. He’d run a long way. At last he let himself stop and catch his breath. He was panting, and as he dropped to the ground by the fence, he began to shiver, cold despite his ragged coat of fur.

  He was still wearing jockey shorts, Willie noticed after he’d rested a moment. He would have laughed, if he’d had the throat for it. He thought of the man in the pickup and wondered what he’d thought when Willie appeared in his headlights, a gaunt gray specter in a pair of white briefs, with glowing eyes as red as the pits of hell.<
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  Willie twisted himself around and caught the elastic in his jaws. He tore at them, growling low in his throat, and after a brief struggle managed to rip them away. He slung them aside and lowered himself to the damp ground, his legs resting on his paws, his mouth half-open, his eyes wary, watchful. He let himself rest. He could hear distant traffic, a dog barking wildly a half-mile away, could smell rust and mold, the stench of diesel fumes, the cold scent of metal. Under it all was the slaughterhouse smell, faded but not gone, lingering, whispering to him of blood and death. It woke things inside him that were better left sleeping, and Willie could feel the hunger churning in his gut.

  He could not ignore it, not wholly, but tonight he had other concerns, fears that were more important than his hunger. Dawn was only a few hours away, and he had nowhere to go. He could not go home, not until he knew it was safe again, until he had taken steps to protect himself. Without keys and clothes and money, the agency was closed to him too. He had to go somewhere, trust someone.

  He thought of Blackstone, thought of Jonathan Harmon sitting by his fire, of Steven’s dead blue eyes and scarred hands, of the old tower jutting up like a rotten black stake. Jonathan might be able to protect him, Jonathan with his strong walls and his spiked fence and all his talk of blood and iron.

  But when he saw Jonathan in his mind’s eye, the long white hair, the gold wolf’s head cane, the veined arthritic hands twisting and grasping, then the growl rose unbidden in Willie’s throat, and he knew Blackstone was not the answer.